


Live End Street

by GretchenSinister



Series: My Top 10 JackRabbit Fics [12]
Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Golden Age, M/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:47:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22205860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "Jack Overland Frost is an ordinary high school student who was evicted from his house when his parents ran away with his little sister to escape from their accumulated debt. He then meets a stranger (The Groundhog?) who offers him a kiss on the forehead and a place to stay. Desperate, Jack follows the stranger’s directions and ends up in a run-down temple (or sorts, whatever), and meets E. Aster Bunnymund, guardian of Hope and the temple’s local spring deity, along with the other guardians North, Tooth, and Sandy, who are good friends of the slightly vitriolic type with Bunnymund.He then realizes that he is to be the new guardian of Fun, and, eventually and after much hilarity, finally relents...[cut for length]"What would I do without Wikipedia? I’ve never seen the show that this prompt asked for a crossover with, so any mistakes on that front are due to that.SO I made this not only into a vague crossover, but also a sort of Golden Age AU. Jack is a resident of Burge, a planet that the Constellans annexed a while ago. When he has to find a new place to live, he finds not a squat, but a temple inhabited by a pre-invasion god, in the flesh. (And maybe more than one.)
Relationships: E. Aster Bunnymund/Jack Frost
Series: My Top 10 JackRabbit Fics [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1589287
Comments: 2
Kudos: 29
Collections: JackRabbit Short Fics





	Live End Street

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 5/30/2015.
> 
> Here's the rest of the prompt: "Wackiness and hijinks ensue.
> 
> Tl;dr: Kamisama Hajimemashita x-over with Jack as Nanami and Bunny as Tomoe-dono."

Jack sighed as he turned down another street in the Divine Quarter. He must have misremembered the address that the strange old guy had given him. There were no houses for blocks, and the message runner who had directed him here had been very confident that _this_ was where the address Jack had said was. But the only buildings here were old, mostly deserted temples. Sure, they had probably been grand at one point—their grounds spread out so that there was about only one temple per block, now—but at this point they looked like they’d be more likely to house ghosts than gods.  
  
Then again, that might have had something to do with the fact that the grounds were getting _excessively_ overgrown the further he went down the street. What was with that, anyway? The Constellans had made this one of their base cities on Burge decades ago, you’d think they would have had things under control enough to send out a few people with a scythe and a broom, at least. Even walking down the middle of the street, Jack sometimes had to duck or alter his path to avoid a low-hanging branch or the grasp of an over-ambitious bush.  
  
But then again, Jack reasoned, the Constellans no doubt thought it was wiser to not spend their money maintaining a district of gods that had nothing to do with them.  
  
Jack was drawn from his thoughts when he realized he had reached the street’s dead end, or at least he assumed it to be so. A wall of riotous greenery, heavy with oddly unseasonal flowers, faced him, with no visible breaks. And he still hadn’t found the address. He must have followed the messenger’s instructions wrong as well, what was wrong with him today? Well, maybe he could take some of the flowers and sell them. They were nice enough and rare enough at this time of year to at least get him a good meal.  
  
He reached out and grasped a flower stem, but as soon as he did so, a gate screeched open from deep within the greenery. Jack yelped as the old man from before struggled out from a place in the lush verdage that looked no different from the rest of the dead end. “There you are!” the old man said. “Took you long enough to get here!”  
  
“Here?” Jack stared at the man, then the dense growth, and back again.  
  
“Here!” He exclaimed. “Where else would we be? Can’t you recognize the Temple of Spring when you see it?”  
  
“I don’t see it,” Jack said.  
  
The man grumbled for a moment, then said, “I guess you’ll have to get closer. Follow me.” He beckoned Jack forward, and Jack scrambled after him, not wanting to lose him in the dense plant life.  
  
The plants never parted into a path, despite the rusty gate, and Jack wondered, as he fended off branches, how the old man had expected him to know that he was supposed to fight his way in here in the first place. He’d need some sort of supernatural power to even know he had the right address, and if he had power like that, maybe his dad wouldn’t have gambled everything away…  
  
“Here we are!” The old man said, and they emerged into sort of a clearing. Sort of, in the sense that while it was still filled with lush green grass up to Jack’s waist, it was at least possible to see a building in front of them.  
  
It was a stone building, three stories high, with a broad, flat porch supported by arched columns. Wooden panels painted with stylized images of Burge’s plants separated the porch from the rest of the interior, but Jack saw that they could be moved easily to make the ground floor an open, public space. That was fairly standard for temple design, but the rest of it…well, it might have seemed ordinary, if very, very old, had it not been for the plants. Flowering vines clung to the stone, obscuring the shape of the building’s roof, while huge trees overshadowed the clearing, so that only rarely did a sunbeam fall directly on the structure. It made the clearing feel like just as much of a temple as any Jack had ever been in, even if this one wasn’t really active, but was serving as a squat. The longer he looked, though, the more the plants themselves seemed to lend a kind of order to the temple, rather than showing how long it had been abandoned. Wherever decorations had fallen off or worn away, flowers took their places—huge, brilliant flowers that were baffling not only at this time of year but also in this part of Burge. Was that how the old guy survived? Jack wondered. Did _he_ sell them? He could easily live that way, enough so that he wouldn’t have to squat in an abandoned temple, which was blasphemous enough that you were kind of pushing your luck doing so, even if the god inside had moved out.  
  
And Jack wasn’t feeling much like pushing luck right now. “Look, I’m not sure that I’m comfortable squatting here,” Jack said. “I don’t even know why this temple got abandoned in the first place, and—”  
  
“Abandoned!” The old man’s voice was far too loud for a shadowy clearing near a temple, and Jack winced. “He thinks it’s abandoned! He thinks I’m squatting here!” He shook his head and started walking towards the porch, muttering to himself.  
  
“Well, if you’re _not_ then why…” Jack trailed off, his mouth hanging open, as someone moved aside one of the wooden panels and stepped out onto the porch. Even in the soft green light, it was clear that this person was a huge, anthropomorphic rabbit. And not a pooka, either. His shape was that which appeared in illustrations of texts from before the Constellans and their allies had arrived. He was a _Burge_ rabbit-person, impossible to mistake for anything else.  
  
“I _told_ you he was going to be clueless,” the rabbit-person said. “He was born after the invasion and everything.”  
  
“Holy…” Jack managed.  
  
The rabbit-person looked at him with brilliant green eyes that shone even in the dimness. “Unfortunately, yes. Now I say that Ombric here isn’t squatting, and I also say that, yep, unfortunately, and definitely, you are the person we’re looking for. I know your name already, but do you want to introduce yourself?”  
  
“Uh, sure. Hi, I’m Jack.” He smiled, because even if this was so, so much not what he had been expecting, he could still make a good impression.  
  
The rabbit-person offered a very small smile in return. “You can call me Bunny.”  
  
“So, Bunny…what exactly am I the right person for?”  
  
Bunny laughed. “I can tell by the way you’re staring that you’re still having trouble believing I’m standing here. We should probably sit down before I explain anything more. C’mon, Ombric. Bring him inside.”  
  
Bunny disappeared inside the temple and Jack turned to Ombric. “What…that was…I mean, he’s a…why…how?”  
  
“Ask him yourself!” Ombric said, waving Jack up the steps. “That’s what having tea is for! Though since you’re already so pale…” He nodded. “I’ll see if I can get Sandy to wait a bit before he arrives.”


End file.
